“So it’s a performance thing?” asked Ben uncomfortably.
“I don’t know,” said Oksana. “I don’t care what is performance.”
“I mean, it’s a kind of art,” said Ben.
“It can be art, if someone wants.”
“She wants to fuck you, Ben,” said Sabine. “That’s all it is. This is just her fucked-up idea of flirting.” Sabine said to Oksana, “Ben has a girlfriend. A girlfriend with mental health issues. Don’t be a cunt right here in front of me.”
“I maybe want to fuck Ben, okay,” said Oksana. “But it’s not why I told about my birthday. And if I fuck him, it’s not another person’s business. He’s not a child.”
“I don’t even have a thousand dollars,” said Ben, then realized belatedly it was the wrong thing to say.
Sabine shook her head disgustedly. “I think we’re done here. Are we done here, Ben?”
And he went home to Kate. And on the night he went for drinks with the ExxonMobil people, and Alicia—his beautiful, sane co-worker—stroked Ben’s arm, pretending to be checking the texture of his absolutely ordinary shirt, Ben went home to Kate. He went home every night, though every night he balked at the door and didn’t want to go in. He would ache on the doorstep with some inexpressible thing. He would want to call his Dad, even knowing that his Dad couldn’t help; his Dad had fallen at this same hurdle. And he went in to Kate, even though seeing Kate didn’t solve the problem of agonizingly missing Kate.
She would say, “I do like some things here. I like you,“ and it wouldn’t be enough.
He would say, “I like you, too,” and it wouldn’t sound true.
Ben would shut down. Would not be able to talk to her. His mind would run back and forth, insisting that he had to leave her, but he couldn’t bear to leave her, but he had to leave her soon. When they made love, he couldn’t shake the idea that it was sexual abuse, that Kate was mentally incompetent. Some days, she was pain incarnate. She would suffer all day and he would try to cheer her up and fail, and he felt like an irrelevant gnat.
The marriage license sat in a drawer. Ben never mentioned it and Kate never mentioned it. In his low moments, Ben wondered if she even remembered they’d meant to get married.
The last day began with inexplicable grace. They were at the apartment in Queens and woke in the morning to intense strange birdsong. They sleepily went to the window, where they saw a new neighbor moving in and carrying birdcages, four at a time. Already there were two dozen cages in a cluster underneath the sycamore in the courtyard. Presumably he’d brought the birds there first so they wouldn’t have to wait in a car in the heat. Because of the inexplicable grace, Ben and Kate didn’t hesitate but threw on clothes and went out to meet the neighbor, who turned out to be not just a bird fancier but an ornithologist, and he explained the jealous nature of cockatoos and the fragile constitutions of finches and told them how he’d taught his canaries to sing by playing them tapes of more accomplished canaries, though this had the unintended effect that his parrots and mynah and even some parakeets began to sing along, so now his home was a cacophony of bad canary imitations. He’d given up the records, he’d sold the canaries, but the other birds still taught it to each other. “I’m beginning to be afraid,” he said, “it will spread to all the birds in the world.” At that point, the macaw in the cage at his feet said, “Christ! Do something, Jack!” and the ornithologist excused himself and went back to toting birds.
From then on, the day was under the sign of magic. It was Saturday; they had the whole day free, and the temperature was already ninety-five degrees. You took a step and you were instantly bathed in sweat, loose limbed, and dazed. Somehow this freed them. They went out to breakfast and got chocolate cake; there was a sybaritic happiness that just made sense.
Leaving the diner, they ran into their neighbor Paola, who was walking her Great Dane and crying. She said she had to pick her mother up from the hospital but now she’d locked herself out of her apartment, and she didn’t have time to get a locksmith, but she couldn’t bring the dog into the hospital either. So Ben and Kate took charge of the dog—an irresponsible, dragon-like, piebald beast named Butch—and walked to the river and bought Butch ice cream, all the while sweating torrentially, until Butch lay down on the sidewalk and sprawled and lolled and refused to budge. They tugged. They cajoled. Threw sticks. Nothing doing. At last, Kate sat on the ground beside Butch and explained that at home they had air-conditioning, and Butch nodded—actually nodded—and got to his feet and walked sensibly home.
(In all this time, Kate hadn’t said anything about her world or the dream. Ben started to think the pills were working. They’d taken their time but now they’d worked. It could all still be all right.)
At the apartment, Butch stretched out on the floor and filled the living room from end to end. Ben and Kate stood in the doorway and laughed at the dog until tears came to their eyes. Then they sat around the edges of the dog and watched a video—Terminator 2—which turned out to be about a woman who was locked in a mental ward because a time traveler had come to warn her about an impending apocalypse. It was just close enough: Ben and Kate laughed helplessly, they laughed until their stomachs hurt. It was a joke no one else in the world would understand.
But as they watched the movie, they gradually sobered. They sobered until it was a kind of malaise. And when it was over, they watched all the credits, afraid of whatever the next thing was. At last, there was nothing left and Ben turned the television off and Kate said, “Listen, if you need to break up with me, I get it. I know about your mother. I’m not going to blame you. Do you need to break up?”
And Ben said, “Yes.”
18
And asleep into a dark that was thoughtless May, prolific of stars and clear sweet nights and airs that tasted starry. Awake to a bright, brave night, a night to stalk from bed on naked foot and go—
(you had fallen asleep in tears, you had cried yourself to sleep like a child)
(that someone in the night could forgive you; there could still be one thing pure; you had cried yourself to sleep like a child).
He expected her.
He waited in the garden with the dark world redolent of grass and lavender and rosemary. He took her hand and as they crept into the orchard a moth flew ahead of them and vanished in the moonlight. The trees wheeled in the wind overhead. They didn’t say anything. Will spread his cloak on the ground.
His hands were callused like workmen’s hands, like the hands of Emilia’s violin-playing cousins. They rasped on her thigh; they were strange on her cunt. She clung to him. The stars stood absolutely still in the sky.
When it was over, she thought of Ben and wept in a fit of sentiment. Will made nothing of it; a thing women did. He stroked her absently and said, “Thou art as the tender leaves of spring; as dew thereon. As the infant morning, thou art fresh and bright. Thou art all new things in the world.”
It meant nothing, perhaps. It was a species of courtesy. Maybe he was sketching a poem and it wouldn’t come right.
She said, “Well, thou know’st it is false.”
(But neither of them mentioned the dreams. They were there being lovers like any real lovers, and the woods and the spring; it was enough for the time.)
Another night the same. And another night. A night when she sent Mary away so she and Will could sleep together in Emilia’s bed. Toward dawn, they crept down the stairs to the buttery and drank milk from a jug. They kissed with milky mouths. And the orchard again, and the scratches on her thighs. Already it was brazen and everyone knew. Her head was full of the scent of midnight flowers, like the ghosts of daytime flowers; her skin raw and aware, her body’s blood still full of the touch of his hands.
One night she gave him a token, a scented handkerchief embroidered with silk moths. One night he was jealous and came to her door; then Mary (who hated him for being no noble lord, who had wanted it to be Southampton) called out savagely, “Begone, we want none of thine indecencies here.” One nig
ht they fucked in the orchard while the rain turned into a downpour; they came back bedraggled and stumbled on the frothy gentleman—the scholar Florio—reading in an office, surrounded by a fairy circle of leaning candles.
“Hunting my lord’s game by night?” said Florio to Will, with a smirk at Emilia.
“Nay, we have taken the beggar’s bath,” said Will, “in the tears of the moon. So our thoughts are made clean of such impure fancies.”
At which Florio laughed uneasily, and resented Will thereafter.
Another rainy night they sat at the drawing room fire. The silver-haired cat stalked back and forth, pausing curiously to sniff Emilia’s toes. Then she wistfully talked of her makeshift husband, her cousin Alfonso Lanier, and said she hoped she might be brought to love him, that she might yet make a wife. Will swore she would not. He said he would put the feeble husband in a play, which Emilia might watch and be healed of her strange ambition.
“He is no hero for a play,” said Emilia. “He is but a poor piper and no ill-omened king.”
“Nay,” said Will. “’Twould be a comedy. And a comedy must have its cuckold; else how shall our rakes be made to laugh?”
“If they laugh or no, let it be without me.”
“Nay, madam, but say how thy husband offends thee. I’ll trim my lines to fit.”
“And how doth thy wife offend thee?” (For Emilia knew Will had a wife, a dull Ann, who waited at home and brewed beer and grew fat, and Will brooked no jokes on his Ann.)
But now he said, “Why, she offendeth me even as the cruel and hard-beaked bird offendeth the tender worm. It is a comedy we write: If a man have a wife, she must be a shrew. So, madam?”
“And if he offend me not?”
“Then he is no husband, nor no man. Give me but one bough on which to sling a jest, and I shall see the beggar hanged.”
Then he pestered her—relentless, merry, irresponsible—until she surrendered and said, “He offendeth me in spending of my money and pawning of my jewels that I had before we wed.”
“Ah!” he said. Then he looked into the fire and frowned. Emilia sighed impatiently and held out her hand to the cat—but Will had already turned back. “’Tis done. We begin with a knave and a wench who speak scurvily together of thy husband. ’Tis a common contrivance and plays well.
“So, Sir Lackpenny speaks: God’s bread! This Lanier is a sort of cattle that cannot wear his horns in peace, but must shake them at every penny; if he hath not his daily fodder in gold, he kicks the barn to shivers.
“Mistress Slackpurse answers: Nay, ’tis a worshipful ox, that will be fed on angels and crosses; the mildest that ever ate coins from a woman’s hand.”
Emilia said, “Now thou makest me to repent mine honesty. My husband is a good youth and took me when no man else would have me. He spends from my purse—well, there’s no marvel. He married my purse and not my person. His plunders please me not, but he hath not earned my mocks.”
“And yet the scene plays well.”
“Nay, can you not write an honest play, wherein a poor man is not scorned for doing what every poor man would?”
“Thou speak’st wisely, fair mistress,” Will said, “but it maketh but a dull-going play. Thou makest a play for booing, for hurling of pippins at actors’ heads. I have a play, and thou hast no play.”
“Thy play is stale. ’Tis a hard-mouthed jade. Thou sell’st a wine that hath been in a thousand mouths.”
“And ’twas applauded by all these mouths. Were I to give thy play to the players, they would send for Tom Nashe straight, to write it over with a cuckold and a shrew.”
She scoffed and said she knew no Nashe; then he led her to a pantry and they fucked against the wall. The night was close and soft. The pounding of the rain in the windows was an unsteady heartbeat. She felt every blink of her eyes as pleasure, as a tragedy. Every breath was real.
They didn’t mention the dreams. He didn’t, and she didn’t know why. She didn’t; she felt that if they talked about the dreams, she might wake up, and she couldn’t face that again—to be a crazy lady, bloated from meds; to walk on eggshells and understand nothing. It was that or the starry orchards and wine and the cat creeping by to inspect them in the firelight, its fur damp from dew and scented with the garden’s rosemary; the long soft days. There was really no decision to be made.
But then another night he came to her bedchamber not in jealousy but in fear. He had dreamed of the city beyond the world’s end, its broken towers in their cloaks of dirty ice, its ash and silence. She went with him, and they crept through the slumbering house. Then he spoke of the city—a harmless apparition that touched him not, yet he feared it as a fornicating priest feared hell. There death itself had perished, and yet drab eternity must go on. It could never be done with being.
Then he spoke of his time as a “sleeping Jew,” when he’d lived another life in dreams. He was seventeen then, a green boy like any—but each night in sleep, he rode with conquering Alexander to his wars. It was the antique east, Macedonian Greece. He had worn a bronze cuirass, curiously formed in the likeness of a man’s bare chest. He had fought with a spear, and once thrust the spear into a man’s open mouth; then in dying the man’s jaws clenched and wrenched the weapon from his hand, and so in the melee the spear was lost. At Persepolis, where it rained unluckily on their battle, Will’s horse had gone mired in bloody water; it came forth with four socks of blood and went queerly lame thereafter.
The dream was greater than a dream. It was a greater life than life. And in waking, Will doted and doubted his memory. He forgot the very names of the places about him. He forgot the day before and the name of the queen. He woke to find that England’s church had put the pope out of doors, and the saints had different names. The bears had all been hunted from the forest, and the fringey storks were gone from the air. His father had become a swine-drunk bankrupt; his mother a greensick scold. How it seemed to him, he had dreamed a thousand evil changes on the world.
“So I was famed for my madness,” he said. “But God be thanked, that hath now passed.”
They had stopped in the gallery, before the tall windows. In the garden, a wind was blowing; the grasses flattened and sprang up again as if stroked by an invisible hand. They watched and felt the feelings of their kind, as if they read the starry page of night and found written there: The wind goeth over it, and it is gone.
She said, “And hadst thou a friend like me in Greece? Was there any there who dreamed?”
“Ay, the prince Alexander. He dreamed of Troy. There he had lived as the lady Cassandra, who warned of the city’s fall, but none would hear.” Then Will fell silent; a disconnected moment.
She thought he was marshaling his memories, but when he spoke again, he said, “And in the time of thy waking, hast thou such a friend?”
“Yes,” she said and fell silent alike.
At last, he touched her arm. She sighed and said, “But thou dream’st of Greece no more?”
“No more. These ten years I am free.”
“Free,” she repeated. “And how wert thou freed?”
He laughed. “Ask me not. For here I have no other friend. I would keep thee here and be not alone.”
Then he led her to the garden, to the shadow of the woods, and they fucked to the courteous hootings of owls; when she opened her eyes, a fox stood silhouetted on the starlit lawn. And the world was forgotten. She was fucking, she was real. They walked back barefoot through the damp grass, and she was shining with fear, with knowledge, with the blackness beyond the world’s end.
By that time, their trysts were the gossip of the house. People smirked and relished the topsy-turvy: Emilia should have been Southampton’s mistress; her being here otherwise made no sense. There were other lovers at Cowdray, but theirs was the chaos that inspirited the place; theirs was the May and the name of debauchery. If the household had a Dionysian air, it was theirs.
They were Southampton’s. When Will wrote sonnets, they extolled Southa
mpton’s beauty, not Emilia’s. She played her lute at Southampton’s feet; she sewed Southampton a shirt of lawn. In the long spring days, they were figures in Southampton’s idyll and only thought to please their youthful lord, so glorious and pure, like an animated jewel. The nights were sneaking infidelities, therefore, or else the days were lies. Or the other way around; it was never really clear. And the confusion spread to everyone there.
All the company soon was restless, sleepless, troubled by lascivious dreams. The scholar Florio began an affair with a laundress but pined for Lady Danvers, who became infatuated with the Earl of Rutland, who made cow eyes at the teenaged Lady Montague, who naively doted on her tosspot husband. Even the cat conceived an unrequited passion for Sir Harry Danvers. The maidservants all were in love with Southampton, in a rapt unhoping way, like a tribe of poets in love with the moon; one would have a fit of tears, then it spread to another and another, until all the house heaved with love’s calamity. Mary, infected by the spirit of uproar, announced to Emilia that, when she was grown, she wanted to become a great lady’s fool; she would ride a caparisoned cow and fall from a tree limb into a barrel, like Her Majesty’s fool, Lucretia the Tumbler. Minor disorders broke out everywhere. A gentleman usher beat his wife, and she ran into the night and tore her hair. Stockings were found in the Neptune fountain. The horses neighed and kicked in their stalls.
Last of all, Southampton fell. It began with a letter from one of his friends that mentioned “your man Shakspear” and spoke of the very great fashion his poem Venus and Adonis was in at the Inns of Court: “No carouse can be drunk without a verse there from.” Southampton called for a copy of the poem—which, like all Will wrote, was dedicated to him—and read it through one rainy day. He saw himself in the figure of the pure Adonis and confirmed with Will it was so; then he must ask everyone if he were truly held to be so virtuous. He read Adonis’s lines out loud and laughed and insisted that everyone marvel at the wit and honeyed poetry.
The next day, Will wore the earl’s livery badge, a jewel of a hawk in enamel and gold, which he continually, absently, hid with his hand. He ate at Southampton’s table; he was given a suit of the earl’s old clothes. He spent an hour closeted with Southampton in his rooms, while all the house around grew restive. The housemaids squabbled. Viscount Montague drank. The Earl of Rutland said that if the theaters must close, the players should be shut up in them, lest they spread infection through the countryside. Sir Harry Danvers said every theater was a stew, and the players were panders who grew rich from the whores that plied the crowd; then he absented himself to play billiards and chase away the cat with his cue. Even Lady Montague said it was queer so rough a man should be so favored; poesy was a fine thing, she knew, a great thing. Still, it was queer.
The Heavens Page 14
